My first order from Maiko is on the way; received an e-mail this morning. Not a good start: they are sending it 3 days after I ordered (not 1 as I am used to), and seemingly have mangled my postal address.

I ordered sencha from maiko.ne.jp a couple of times during 2008, but when they suddenly imposed a "foreigner tax" of 33% in 2009, I stopped buying from them, as I obviously would not get what I paid for. The prices are still 33% higher on the English page than on the Japanese page. The reason for the difference in prices was, according to a mail they sent out in January 2009:"In response to retailers that would like to sell our teas overseas we raised the prices of our products to allow for a reasonable profit margin."

Interesting. They have mostly priced me out of their sencha market for a few years, not that I was overly impressed in the first place. Except for a shincha order, but their 2011 shincha "shincha" was awful. I still will place an occasional gyokuro order. I like the Yamashita quite a bit. I wonder why they think people will buy from them when there are other Uji vendors that have more consistent tea at Japanese market prices or have websites that were designed in this century.

I must have missed that email. I remember checking the Japanese site years ago and was surprised to see the same pricing on English pages ... though this is what I would like to see.

... hmm, perhaps they ware willing to sacrifice online sales in hopes of building an international retailer network.

In general it is not unusual for a manufacturer to have a same or higher price than you can buy at the retail level even though they could obviously sell for less. This provides incentive for retailers to carry their product and incentives for customers to look on the retail level.

Unfortunately, we generally do not shop on the retail level for many types of tea since the supply line is defective at best or nonexistant at worst.

FWIW, I've had no reason to complain about their prices and the respective quality you get. It is similar to other online vendors selling internationally. Maiko has been one of my go to places for asamushi sencha. Maruyama (this one is excellent, come on), Kamo (surprisingly good for the price) and their organic sencha (excellent) are staples for me. They have a yearly sale (in March if I remember correctly) with some very good deals. That's when I buy from them.